The Color of White

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Four years ago my husband and I moved into our first apartment together. It was perfect in many ways— recently renovated, great neighborhood, plenty of storage space— but it missed something vital for me. It felt cold, dark, and lacked the personality that I loved so much in my previous, older apartments. For months I devised ways to make the space more hospitable and energizing, buying plants (which quickly died due to lack of light), hanging mirrors, rearranging the furniture, and dreaming of ways to cut holes in the ceiling to let the light through. We are not allowed to paint the rooms, and the sickly yellow-green “navajo white” walls were made even greener by the light that filtered in through the outside oaks. Eventually I accepted that not every home is perfect, and that I was lucky to be living with the person I loved in a comfortable space. But a lingering, faint depression remained. My home has always been my sanctuary, and I never felt totally comfortable in this home. This project has become my therapy. When I feel like I want this place to change, I find a corner or a shadow or a color somewhere in the house and record it the way that I want to remember it. Sometimes the results are surprising. And often, to my delight, the colors I find aren’t green.